First off, I STRONGLY recommend disabling Friendly Fire and Threat Spawns before playing (in the "Advanced" section of character select - they don't affect achievements whatsoever and are just generally annoying to play with. Friendly Fire causes explosive abilities to damage you (even in single player!) and Threat Spawns just makes an increasing amount of enemies spawn more over time each level eventually forcing you to leave (or die).

NOTE: there is a bug with these settings that if you save + quit they will turn back to on when you reload the game so be careful if you do so

Each class has 4 abilities - a basic attack, a defensive maneuver, and 2 offensive abilities (one regular cooldown and one with charges). The basic attack can destroy most things (including most terrain) and on top of this the player can dig through most terrain by walking into it.

Some terrain has purple crystals called "Juice" - the games main currency - on top of it that you gather by digging through it. Players will destroy the Juice if they use abilities unless they have acquired the Extraction perk which allows abilities to gather Juice, although Preacher can Tackle to collect it still and Unum gets Mineral Suction instead which allows Vacuum to collect it but nothing else.

If you are not finding enough Juice Essence from levels, be sure to keep an eye out for isolated purple dots embedded in terrain. Killing the resulting enemy will grant a Juice Essence.

Each character has their own set of perks that will augment a specific ability, and most of them will unlock 1 or 2 more perks that you can get after that which makes it a sort of perk tree. Each player besides Unum also has an Extraction perk they can get which will cause abilities to gather Juice from terrain instead of destroying it.

Recommendations
Overall I recommend getting most of the perks that boost each classes primary attack and focusing on 1-2 of the other abilities. Most of the explosive abilities seem... bad so I essentially avoided them altogether.

As sustain in this game is pretty powerful, you should try and get Healing Cloud ASAP and related those perks by character level 25. For Commando that's the Dodge Roll upgrade for healing, Magnus is just Shield Booster, and Unum is the Plasma Daggers upgrade for life drain.

Here's my general recommendation for each char:

• Commando - flamethrower is great, dodge roll perks are ok, bomb I barely used
  
• Magnus - shield booster is S tier, mighty slash + whirlwind is great, shockwave kinda useless
  
• Preacher - tackle is great, as are shotgun and grenade launcher, fear is meh
  
• Unum - vacuum is S tier, basically didn't use anything else

For Commando I put a couple of points in flamethrower to deal with packs and then otherwise was using the basic attack. Magnus I essentially just get the Shield Booster perks until the 100% boost for standing still and then upgrade Mighty Slash for Whirlwind. Preacher becomes invincible with tackle and it can clear out a lot of terrain (although Plasma Shotgun also does wonders for that late game). I highly recommend getting the invulnerability before the first boss and then otherwise focusing on shotgun or grenade launcher (you can almost max all 3 by the end). For Unum I usually get Mineral Suction first as it speeds up clear time immensely, then upgrade Plasma Daggers to get the life drain and then go back to Vacuum.

Challenges are useful for gaining more of the star meta currency used to unlock things, but they also cost stars so really only good if you can complete them. Each character has the same set of challenges so you can get some stars easily if you like one of them over the rest. I only ever used the first 3 and then got Grongo Slayer normal for Unum to do one of the achievements. Up to you here but overall just an extra time sink for really not a massive gain.

My basic strategy for everyone is first upgrade their basic attack once or twice and then 1-2 in a primary ability and 1-2 in the defensive ability. Extraction can be useful early but isn't ever necessary. If you're playing Unum you can basically pump all your perks into Vacuum and Plasma Daggers and be good to go. One of the biggest causes of death is not having sustain, so if you are playing anyone but Preacher be sure to pick those up perks at least before the first boss fight.

I always get Healing Cloud and try to max it ASAP (for sure before the end of world 1). I'll then try to sit in a Survival level and grind XP to level 25 before continuing on. If you have Threat Swarms enabled you can instead grind every level a bit in order to help out but eventually you'll get overwhelmed.

Eventually enemies will start throwing a lot of AoE abilities at you which can be annoying, but if you're level 25+ and have been getting all the event-related perks they shouldn't be an issue. Healing Cloud does wonders for survivability once you upgrade it so be sure to exploit it as often as you can. For the most part the game isn't too difficult so as long as you've got Healing Cloud and maybe one or two other item unlocks you should be all set unless you get overwhelmed and get AoE'd to death.

You can buy and hold up to 10 items (basically just passive bonuses) at a time from shops using Juice. You can also upgrade most items using Juice or Juice Essence. Most final levels of items require 10 Juice Essence to upgrade, although some only require Juice still. For the most part the items are forgettable, however unlocking them provides permanent passive upgrades to your starting stats so it's worth getting all of them eventually. The stats they upgrade are arranged by row in the unlock menu there - from top to bottom damage, crit, health, and digging power.

"Boosts" are essentially just consumables - the same boosts are available at each Forge but I never bought any of them outside of Essence Compressor (well and Portable Battery for the one achievement that's needed for).

NOTE: you can get rid of items you no longer need so if you are capped at 10 and want something else you can drop it (although you don't get refunded).

There's only a couple items I recommend always getting (although if you're achievement hunting there is one that is necessary for a couple of them). Here are the ones that are not completely useless (I recommend prioritizing the ones in bold):

Offense
Most of the items that are useful here are character dependent, although none of them here are really all that great due to their cooldowns.

• Riot Gear (Magnus) - decently useful for Magnus when upgraded before you get Whirlwind
  
• Lacerating Bullets (Unum) - adds to the DoT build with the poison upgrade
  
• Tesla Coil - only really for Commando / Unum but the cooldown and damage are pretty bad

Defense
If you only get one item in the game it should be Healing Cloud here but there's a few others that are useful. If you're playing on Rogue then the healing ones are even more useful since health regen is disabled and there are limited other forms of healing.

• Healing Tool - not as good as Lifehunt Bayonet but less expensive if you can't afford it yet
  
• Lifehunt Bayonet - free healing is always nice, albeit not a massive amount
  
• Electro Weave - can be a lifesaver when overwhelmed, but also just generally good
  
• Healing Cloud - S tier as the final upgrade grants XP while standing in it allowing infinite XP
  
• Reactive Shield (Magnus) - not all that useful aside from Magnus where it's pretty great

If you're worried about dying you can get Panic Button or Pacemaker Y3S but for the most part they're avoidable. Also note that some enemies have a harmful green acid cloud that damages you while you stand in it - since the Healing Cloud effect is also green it can be hard to seem them so while the damage isn't high by any means be careful when you find those enemies if you have it.

Utility
For the most part you can avoid this shop altogether outside of a few specific situations. The Juice boosting (lol) items aren't really worth it aside from Mugger's Gloves.

• Juice Radar - useful when you're first learning the game, useless after that
  
• Energy Scanner - good for helping find the teleporter for the timed challenges
  
• Obsidian Hammer - needed for a few achievements
  
• Mugger's Gloves - the only item here I buy regularly, extremely useful when XP farming

Stat
Only a couple here I'd recommend, and even then they're mostly just for faster boss kills.

• Rage Syringe - huge damage boost when hit, which happens often
  
• Salvo - pure crit boost == more damage
  
• Penetration - more crit damage is nice - mostly useful just for bosses

You can get Combat Armor here as well for the HP boost but you don't really need it most of the time.

In order to exit a level the player needs to find the teleporter to the next area, although some might have different requirements before they can be used:

• Generator - interact to spawn 2 turrets + enable exit, can follow lines to teleporter
  
• Power Disruptor - destroy 3 red sawblade looking things to enable exit
  
• Survive - teleporter exit charges up over 140s while enemies spawn every ~10s

Chests contain different things based on their appearance and is fairly straightforward:

• purple - juice
  
• yellow - juice essence
  
• red - health
  
• blue - shield
  
• purple / green triangles - juice / essence reward

Almost every level will have at least one event in them that provides rewards for completion. Here is each event and how to complete it.

Monument

Can interact to donate 80 Juice. The first time will grant an EXP orb and the second will give an orb that permanently boosts a random stat. After donating twice the monument will be destroyed. Can also destroy it which will drastically increase the threat of the current level.

Runes


There are 3 of the red runes in the level, just need to walk over each one and some normal enemies will spawn. Killing them will give a chest reward of Juice or Juice Essence. Once complete the runes will turn purple.

Blood Altar

Pretty sure one of these is exactly one of these in each world. Kill enemies that are over it to charge the blood altar, or you can also interact with it to sacrifice 45 HP per charge. It takes roughly 4-6 enemies or 10 donations (so 450 HP) to fully charge. Once charged the altar will spawn a boss type enemy that grants a perk orb and a data fragment if in world 1.

Each world has a mini-boss in level 4 and a final boss at the end. I won't go into detail on their abilities but the mini-bosses are essentially just straight damage (although the world 2 mini-boss can be damaged by its own rocket). The world bosses just generally need some amount of sustain as you'll likely take some damage throughout - nothing too complicated here or any "gotcha" kind of moments.